by Rachel Caine
“You know what I’m talking about.”
The stranger was asking me to hand over the scroll. For a heart-stopping second I remembered the ruined cell phone, dripping water, before Rashid had deigned to repair it. Was the scroll equally damaged? I ignored the man with the knife, although he said something else, probably a threat to emphasize why I had to obey him. I reached into my jacket and pulled out the hard cylinder of the scroll. It looked seamless. No water dripped from it. I traced a finger along the edge, and the casing split, retracted, and the paper beneath was crisp and dry. I let out a relieved, slow breath.
“I said,” the man driving said, “hand it over. I will cut you, bitch. Your choice.”
He was jumpy. Unpredictable. His knuckles were white around the knife.
I sealed the scroll, put it back in my jacket with a feeling of cold relief, and sat back against the drug-scented upholstery as he accelerated the car, no doubt to convince me I couldn’t safely dive from it.
He lifted the knife threateningly.
I grabbed his hand, twisted, and slammed the blade down into his own right leg.
“Who sent you?” I asked. “Who told you where to find me? Who told you my name? Who knows I have the scroll? Is it Ben Turner?”
He screamed, face going stark white, and hit the brakes with his left foot, sliding the car to a noisy, jittering stop in the middle of an intersection. Overhead, the swaying traffic signal clicked from green to yellow to red. He whimpered and let go of the knife, staring at it stupidly.
I reached over and pulled it out in one fast, efficient pull. Blood immediately flooded out to soak his jeans. It was deep, but he had missed the larger arteries. Not through any planning on my part.
“You bitch,” he said. “You bitch, you stabbed me!” “Technically, I did not. You stabbed yourself.” I stared at him without any feeling of empathy at all. Perhaps I was still more Djinn than Rashid thought. “Now, answer my questions. Who sent you?”
“Fuck you.”
Luis would have been appalled, but Luis wasn’t here. I responded to the man’s rudeness by putting a slender bronze fingertip on his wound, and pressing down into it. He whined in the back of his throat and struck out at me, but it was weak, and I easily fended him off as I pushed my finger deeper into the gash.
“Now,” I said, in exactly the same tone. “There’s another inch before I hit bone. Tell me who sent you.”
“Turner!” he screamed. His face had gone the color of spoiled milk. “Ben Turner, okay? I owed him!”
I sat back, wiped the blood from my metal hand onto the upholstery of his car, and considered what he had just said. “He sent you to follow me.”
“Yeah.” His breath was coming short now. “I was supposed to jack you and get the scroll. Wasn’t supposed to be any big deal.”
“And how is it now?” Facetious question. I waved it aside. “And how do you know Agent Turner?”
“He busted up a meth lab couple of months ago around here. Told me I’d have to do him a favor to stay out of prison.” The man gave a dry, wicked chuckle. “Some favor.”
“He didn’t warn you about me?”
The man shrugged, both hands now clamped protectively over his bleeding leg. He avoided looking directly at me.
“Ah,” I said, light dawning. “You didn’t listen. He did warn you, but you thought you could handle me in your own way.” I smiled slowly. “How has that worked out for you?”
He was beyond mouthing insults now. I considered leaving him by the side of the road, then reached across him, opened his door, unbuckled his seat belt, and said, “Come around the car to the passenger side.”
He stared at me, blue eyes wide and oddly childlike under the baffled rage. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to the hospital to have a talk with Special Agent Turner,” I said. “And I might as well take you with me. It seems the least I can do.”
I was holding the knife. It seemed that put me in charge. He stared at me for a second, then said, “Don’t take my car. I need my car. I got a job and a family and shit.”
“Then I feel sorry for your employer and your relatives. Come around before you bleed so much you soak the seat.” Because, of course, it would be unpleasant for me—not because I was worried about the man’s health. As the thug got out and limped his way around the back of the car, I slid smoothly over into the driver’s seat.
I considered driving away. I did. But I waited for him to step-drag his way around the trunk, fumble open the passenger door, and drop inside, sobbing for breath. He’d left a wide, shimmering trail of crimson on the pavement in a semicircle around the car.
“Buckle up,” I said, and followed my own advice. He sent me a sweaty, disbelieving look. “It’s the law.”
He couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry; I could see both in the trembling set of his mouth, the shine of his eyes.
I put the knife flat on my thigh, just as he’d done. My eyes brightened just a little with Djinn fire. I know that, because I saw the reflection in his widening eyes. “Buckle. Up,” I said, very precisely.
He jammed the seat belt home with trembling fingers.
I nodded in satisfaction, put the car in gear, and drove, breaking speed limits and ignoring all safety precautions. I sped through red lights, drove down one-way streets, and arrived back at the hospital’s emergency entrance in record time, pulling to a halt barely seven minutes after entering the vehicle.
I got out, dumped the bloody knife into the nearest trash can, and walked away into the hospital. I left the driver’s-side door open. “Hey!” the man inside the car yelled. “Crazy bitch! You can’t just leave like this!”
A nurse on duty at the desk looked up, frowning. I gestured back toward the entrance. “There’s a man in the car,” I said. “He’s bleeding. I think he’s been stabbed. Also, I believe he is on drugs. He’s not making any sense.”
She didn’t seem at all surprised. She merely nodded, gestured to a couple of other medical professionals sitting at a table in another room, and the three of them headed out to tend to my new acquaintance.
I didn’t even know his name.
That did not really distress me.
I took the stairs up to the room where I’d left Brianna with Luis and Turner.
It was empty.
I broke into a flat run, flying past startled interns and doctors, nurses and technicians, and found my way to the room where we’d left Gloria Jensen and her family as well.
Not there.
All of them—the Jensens, Brianna, Luis, Turner—were gone as if they’d never existed at all.
I grabbed a nurse walking by Gloria’s room. “The Jensen girl,” I said. “Where was she taken?”
“She was released,” the nurse said, frowning, and shook free of my grip. “She’s fine.”
I sensed something wrong with her. Deeply wrong. When I stared at her in Oversight, I saw damage in her aura, psychic wounds where someone had savagely and swiftly altered her memories. She’d be ill, later—physically first, then mentally, if she couldn’t adjust to the invasion.
I couldn’t help her. I didn’t have time. There was still a chance that I could sense Luis, if he was close, so I spun away from her and focused on my connection to him, my memories of him.
Nothing came to me that could be felt above the spiking sense of urgency I couldn’t seem to control.
I leaned against the wall, bowed my head, and tried to remember how it was that Luis, with all his Earth powers, had communicated to me silently. It was not what humans thought of as telepathy; it was an independent manipulation of the ear, re-creating sound patterns precisely, even down to intonation. Advanced work, but fairly common among Earth Wardens.
If Luis could do it . . . so could I. But I had no formal training, no idea how to direct the energy to the person I desired to speak with.
I could only try.
Luis.
Nothing. I concentrated on the aetheric essence of the ma
n, on everything I knew and felt of him. On the connection still stretching between us—power and a growing, steel-core sense of need.
Luis.
Nothing. I felt a wave of frustration and helplessness sweeping over me, and focused even more, willing the world away.
Luis Rocha!
And from a great distance, I felt a whisper return. Cass?
Relief, brief and sweet, before reality set in again. He sounded dazed, uncertain, and weak. Worse than I had ever heard him. Cass, be careful, it’s not what you think—
Luis suddenly, invisibly screamed, and I felt the connection shredding apart—not an outside force detecting and destroying it, but his own pain destroying focus.
I opened my eyes, staring blindly at the wall, at the frightened face of the nurse a few feet away, who was gawking at me.
“I’m coming,” I told him aloud. “Hold on. Just hold on.”
And I ran.
I was spoiled for choices in the parking lot, but instead of a motorcycle I found an ambulance, parked and silent, at the back near a maintenance bay. The paper attached under the windshield noted that all repairs had been completed, but the vehicle wasn’t scheduled to be returned to duty until the next day.
I might need medical facilities. And armored transport for several people. The ambulance was a perfect choice, except for the inevitable stew of horror that awaited me on the sensory level. Although it was cleaned, bleached and sanitized, nothing could completely erase the odors—psychic, possibly—of blood, sweat, vomit, and death that lurked in the rear compartment of the vehicle.
Luis had held on to our connection, somehow, but it did not provide much of a sense of direction. He kept up a steady stream of whispers, some bursting wildly into static that told me he was struggling to keep his pain at bay. Twice the connection snapped altogether, leaving me silent and desperate, but he managed to reach out again.
I knew I was his lifeline.
I just didn’t know how I would be able to save him.
“I call on the Djinn to bargain,” I said. “I will bargain favors and obligations in return for assistance. I, Cassiel, swear this.”
It was a formal call for help, to the Djinn. I had never used it, never in my lifetime; it was an admission of weakness among the Djinn to be forced to bargain with another of equal or greater status, of being unable to charm or trick the service from another.
No one answered.
No one.
I had not expected Ashan to come calling; my Conduit had made himself very clear when he’d cast me out from his ranks that I could not approach him again, save at a crawl, and even then only once I’d fulfilled the mission he’d given me. The other True Djinn would not dare to cross him, except Venna, but Venna had problems of her own, from what I had been told.
But the New Djinn should have been interested enough to at least ask.
I had screamed into the darkness, and gotten back nothing. Not even an echo.
And then I felt the weight in the van shift, and looked in the rearview mirror to see that one Djinn had, after all, answered my call.
“Interesting,” Rashid’s voice said from behind me. “I know that as a human you’re required to earn your bread, but surely this seems a strange time to learn a new trade as a physician?”
I looked into the rearview mirror to see that he was sitting on the clean, empty gurney in the back, idly fiddling with medical supplies. He looked better. Still indefinably . . . not quite himself. The battle with the golem had taken something out of him, and it would take time for him to recover. I couldn’t give him time.
“Why did you respond?” I asked him. “No one else did.”
“You mentioned the magic word,” he said. “Bargain.”
“You’re still hurt,” I said. It wasn’t even a question, and he didn’t debate it pointlessly. “What about the other New Djinn?”
“They’re not coming.”
“Not even one.”
“Our new replacement Conduit, Whitney, has allied with Ashan on this. No Djinn will come to your aid, Cassiel. No one.” He smiled, briefly, teeth flashing. “Well. One, perhaps. If you make it worth my while.”
I stared at him steadily. “Why?”
“Maybe I just like a good fight.” His lips twitched, briefly. “I’m not on your side. I’m on no one’s side. I simply like mayhem.”
“Rashid.” I heard the desperation in my own voice, and I know he did as well, though he never looked up from his contemplation of a sealed package of bandage. “Deal with me.”
“All right.” He sat back, crossed his legs with such fluidity that he might have been a yogi, and leaned against the wall. “Bargain.”
“I wish you to direct me to where Luis Rocha is being held—the man named Luis Rocha whom you met, the Warden who is my partner,” I quickly clarified. I had been a Djinn once. That would have been the first maliciously exploitable hole I would have seen. “I wish you to fight by my side against whatever comes to save his life, and the lives of the other Wardens and humans we may find. Will you bargain for this?”
Rashid closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. They blazed with opalescent, changing colors. “If I do,” he said, “there’s only one thing I will bargain for.”
I knew what he wanted. The scroll. I couldn’t allow it to leave my hands. I couldn’t.
“Ask for something else,” I said.
Rashid’s teeth flashed in a mirthless grin. “I am not extremely prone to being ordered around, you know. What do you offer, then?”
These were not idle discussions, not this time. I had made a formal offer, and now we were dealing . . . and deals, to the Djinn, were extremely important. There was an art to it, of course; the Djinn delighted in finding ways around, under, and through deals to their own advantage, and the disadvantage of those they treated with. A kind of supernatural game of skill and treachery. For all my age, however—and I had been a Djinn far longer than Rashid—it was a game I was not well versed in. I had avoided humankind most of my existence.
Rashid was a veteran of such encounters. There was a very real risk that in this, at least, I was out of my depth.
“Give me a direction to follow before we go any further,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because time will be short, and I want to be at least driving in the right direction!”
He accepted that with a placid nod. “Toward Rose Canyon. As you suspected.”
I was already headed that way, generally. I felt a tight knot in my chest loosen enough to allow me to take a steady breath.
“What is your offer?” Rashid asked. I glanced at him again in the rearview, but there was nothing to be read in his expression. His eyes were once again closed, his body relaxed. He could have sat for a thousand years in that position, or that was the strong impression he gave.
“Future favors,” I said. “When I regain my position—” He shook his head. “A stupid bargain. You are very likely to die in flesh, Cassiel. And even if you succeed in returning as a Djinn, the change in form would release you from obligation.”
He was right, by the letter of Djinn law; changing from a human to a Djinn—necessary, to regaining my position at all—would mean that I would shed any promises or obligations I vowed in mortal form as well. If I wished to keep them, I could, but it would not be required of me.
A poor bargain for him, indeed. It put him completely at my mercy.
“Then what, as a human, can I offer you that would be of any value?” I snapped. “I’m flesh and bone and blood. I’m nothing.”
Rashid’s eyes opened, and in the same instant, he disappeared from my view. Gone.
No.
I had a fatal second of horror, thinking I had succeeded in destroying the deal with my flash of temper—and then he was back, sitting in the passenger seat next to me, back twisted toward the door to face me. Still cross-legged. I considered ordering him to put on a safety belt, but truly, there was no point.
�
��Nothing,” he repeated. “Is that what you think? That becoming mortal makes you nothing? Then what does that make me? The shadow of nothing? The ghost of nothings past?” I’d sparked a fire in his eyes, orange and red and banked with control. “No wonder the Old Djinn and New Djinn were at war. Djinn have made bargains with mortals for tens of thousands of years. If humans are nothing, what benefit did that have?”
I blinked. I’d been a little prepared for an explosion of fury, not for this precise, reasoned anger. Nor its implications.
“You still don’t understand,” Rashid continued. “You’re in human form, but you are not human. Perhaps you’re getting there; I see signs, here and there. But were you a true human, you would know that what you could offer me is precious. Risk, and chance, and the highest of stakes. A Djinn risks little. A human risks everything in dealing with us.”
“You want my life?”
“No,” he said, and abruptly his eyes faded to a black so deep it seemed like the heart of night. “I want to feel your life. My price is this: Promise to bind yourself to me as a lover. Through this, I will feel mortal things again. Mortal emotions. Mortal joys.”
Rashid was lonely. It was that simple.
Insane, but simple.
What he was asking was startling, but not unprecedented. There had been human/Djinn lovers before; David and the Warden Joanne were the most visible of these, at the current time. And Rashid was attractive to me; as a Djinn, he could make himself attractive to me. Whether he was attracted to my human form, my aetheric presence, or the simple fact that I had been so very powerful, I could not say.
“You can choose any human,” I said. “Any one of them would do. There are many who’d leap at the chance to be your lover, you know.”
“They’re not like you,” he said, and that made my breath stop in my lungs. It was a simple admission, but a significant one. As if he sensed this, he turned toward me and said, “It’s not human love, Cassiel. It’s admiration. You burn. I’m cold. Nothing more.”
It was a fair price.
And still, I found myself saying, simply, “No.” Nothing else. Nothing more. Just a plain, unemotional denial.
Rashid’s eyes stayed black. “I told you, I’m not asking for your love,” he said. “I wouldn’t even want it.”